Ahhh Racism, The Good Ol' Days

Perhaps subconsciously anticipating Trent Lott's retirement announcement this morning, blogger Matthew Yglesias wrote an interesting post-- entitled 'The White Supremacist Caucus'-- on the strong, pre-civil rights coalition of southern Democrats (read: racists) who played an important role in bipartisan cooperation in Congress... particularly as their voters moved toward the Republicans following the Democratic leadership's embrace of civil rights. He discusses how the collapse of this coalition took a lot longer than most remember, well past the 1960s.

The subject of how the political base for this movement went over to the GOP is a major theme of Paul Krugman's book on the rise and fall (and return, he naively believes) of the liberal New Deal coalition-- 'The Conscience of a Liberal' (halfway done reading!). In his chapter on the rise of movement conservatism starting in 1964, he looks at how the movement used distractionary, wedge issues to drive away voters from the Democratic party. Today these issues are terrorism, gay marriage, and illegal immigration (abortion is fading fast as an issue)... but back then, race (and civil rights backlash) was the issue.

While earlier conservatives-- ie. William Buckley in the National Review-- were overt in their support for segregationist policies and/or support for subverting the will of the majority when 'necessary', success came when leaders learned to hide these ideas behind a populist message. He uses the rise of Ronald Reagan to illustrate how this worked, as seen in this video clip.



(UPDATE: This video is down now, but here's a similar one on the issue)

Reading these quotes in the book (from Reagan and others in the '60s), it's amazing how many of these examples are still thrown around lazily by conservatives today... the welfare mama and her Cadillac, the socialist big-government liberals taxing/stealing your hard-earned money to give to lazy poor people, using 'state rights' as a way of supporting bigotry (race issues then, gay issues now), etc. It's a Mad Libs movement, using the same outline, just filling in the blanks with new words to keep up with the times.

As I've noted before, Krugman sees the 2006 election as the death knell for this movement, and the beginning for a realignment of the Democratic Party back to its New Deal roots. I'll wait and see who gets elected in 2008 before I join him there. And not just the Presidency either (Sen. Clinton would, of course, represent the status quo-- not change-- if nominated), but House and Senate newcomers as well. We'll need a lot more Jim Webbs and Jon Testers to offset the complacent Harry Reid and Chuck Schumer types before I am ready to truly celebrate.